Modern TUI frameworks like Ink and Bubble Tea have created an accessibility crisis for blind users, despite the persistent myth that terminal applications are inherently accessible. These frameworks treat terminals as 2D grids rather than text streams, causing screen readers to spam users with fragmentary information and sometimes crash entirely.

The gemini-cli case study demonstrates how these frameworks create "lag loops" where typing triggers massive re-renders of thousands of lines. Users hear random fragments of conversation mixed with timer updates, making the tool unusable. Screen readers like NVDA crash when pasting text, while Speakup becomes overwhelmed by cursor movements updating spinners and timers.

Accessible alternatives succeed by either hiding the cursor (nano, vim), restricting focus to a single column (menuconfig), or leveraging terminal hardware features like VT100 scrolling regions (Irssi). Developers building for the terminal should avoid declarative UI frameworks that optimize for developer experience at the expense of accessibility.